Both mobile wireless telecommunications services and travel are becoming increasingly popular, leading to competition between different network operators for increasing their roaming revenues. “Roaming” occurs when a subscriber from a “home” network uses his same equipment to communicate via a “visited” network while traveling.
These operators of public mobile wireless networks generally establish roaming agreements with each other to provide various mobile services (such as call and non-call related services) to their inbound and outbound roamers in different countries (or within different zones in the same country). Establishing roaming agreements generally requires bilateral agreements (or relationships), which involves roaming commercial agreements, connection setups, International Roaming Expert Group (IREG) tests and Transfer Accounting Data International Group (TADIG) tests. These bilateral agreements allow a network operator to provide different roaming services, such as Global System for Mobile communication (GSM), General Packet Radio Service (GPRS), Customized Applications for Mobile network Enhanced Logic (CAMEL), Third Generation (3G), etc. to its inbound and outbound roamers, eventually attracting more inbound roamers from preferred networks to its networks, and compelling more of its outbound roamers to register with its preferred networks. Furthermore, the network operator may even establish unilateral agreement (e.g., CAMEL to increase its inbound roaming revenue) with some other network operators. The preferred networks are those networks that have bilateral or unilateral agreements with the network operator.
However, in certain cases, big network operators do not prefer to have roaming agreements with new and smaller network operators. In other words, maintaining the roaming agreement with these smaller network operators is not a priority for big network operators. Moreover, these small network operators cannot even afford resources of establishing and maintaining the roaming relationship with these big network operators. In addition, some network operators may wish to launch their services soon or offer new services to their roamers, both of which requires these network operators to establish roaming relationships with other network operators. However, the network operators (launching their services) cannot afford to rely on the time consuming commercial agreement process with other network operators. Hence, such network operators end up providing mobile services to their roamers in few preferred networks with limited services.
Therefore, most of the network operators look for alternative ways of establishing roaming agreements to increase their roaming coverage and provide various mobile services to their inbound and outbound roamers. In one such technique a new network operator establishes one roaming agreement with a broker operator in order to get all roaming agreements with other network operators in an ecosystem that are member networks maintained by the broker operator. However in this case, the new network operator may not join the ecosystem unless the ecosystem is large and covers the roaming agreements that are required by the new network operator. Moreover, this technique still requires broker operator to establish connection setup, and IREG and TADIG tests for such new operator.
Another technique requires a new network operator to piggyback on a host network operator's existing roaming bilateral or unilateral agreements (like GSM, CAMEL and GPRS agreements) in order to provide mobile services to its inbound and outbound roamers. In this case the new network operator utilizes the host network's roaming agreements to exchange signaling messages with selected networks that do not have direct (bilateral) roaming agreements with the new network, but do have such roaming agreements with the host network. The host network corresponds to a network that sponsors the new network operator to extend its roaming coverage to GSM, CAMEL, GPRS, or a combination thereof. Unlike the broker solution where the members of the ecosystem define the roaming coverage, the piggyback solution's roaming coverage for the new network operator is characterized by the roaming agreements of the host network with other networks. Furthermore, the new network operator can also piggyback on the host network's connection setup, and does not require or require less IREG and TADIG tests compared to the broker's solution.
One or more of the above mentioned techniques do not consider the situation where the new (or the established) network operator already possesses a roaming agreement with a roaming partner but wants to use the piggyback technique to establish another roaming relationship with the roaming partner via the host network operator. For example, an ‘X’ operator may already possess GSM roaming agreement with a ‘Y’ roaming partner; however, it may want to also establish GPRS roaming agreement with the ‘Y’ roaming partner (or any other roaming partner) that has no existing GPRS roaming agreement with the ‘X’ operator. Since different roaming coverage is provided by each relationship, such a situation is referred to as a split roaming.
Although voice accounts for majority of the roaming revenue, data agreements (like GPRS agreements) play a significant role in influencing network selection of devices. For example, a 3G device first looks for networks that support 3G. Similarly, GPRS devices, such as blackberry and Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) enabled devices usually first look for networks that support GPRS. As a result, even though these devices might still mainly use voice, the networks that do not have data agreements with home networks of these inbound roaming devices lose the inbound roamers using these devices (and hence lose the otherwise earned roaming revenue from these roamers). Similarly, networks that do not support CAMEL agreements lose CAMEL based prepaid inbound roamers whose home networks may apply steering techniques to move them away to networks that do support CAMEL agreements with these home networks.
In accordance with the foregoing, there is a need in the art of a system, a method, and a computer product, to support the spilt roaming situation in order to extend the roaming coverage of a network operator.